


Chez Moi

by Anonymous



Category: Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
Genre: Other, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-18
Updated: 2008-09-18
Packaged: 2017-10-02 00:01:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Home is where you go and they have to take you in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chez Moi

Sibylla sickened, and died, the second winter they were in France. His grief was clean, not the sour, guilty thing it had been when Nathalie had slipped a knife along the dark lines of her veins. It had been a hard winter, and he had nursed her as well as he could. She did not blame him for her death, he knew.

They could not have stayed in the Holy Land, even had they wished to. She had enjoyed the journey to his home, its total strangeness, but the village itself had disappointed her. His mother's grave was unmarked, and he did not tell her when they passed Nathalie's. There were no soaring crags of ice and the peasants did not guess she had been a queen. The sunsets were pallid and the wine thin and sour.

His touch was the only thing that seemed able to recall her to herself, the woman he had been fascinated by; under his scarred hands, she moaned words in a language he was fast forgetting. Her tongue laved his skin and the pleasure blurred the edges of his vision with remembered ghosts.

He prayed for her soul, as one who had been kind to him, as she who had given him absolution he believed, as a sinner herself. He did not regret touching her, asking her if she would come with him, nor accepting her company when she had agreed. It was simply so lonely without a woman.

There had always been a woman.

First his mother, her lips and long fingers stained with herbs, her voice near as deep as his own even after it broke; then Nathalie, with her sudden silences and quick laughter and eyes like storm clouds about to break open; and then Sibylla, who was so completely foreign to his idea of Eve's daughters that she had frightened as much as aroused him.

There was no woman now, and he did not know what to do without the spectre of sleekly folded skin and delicately boned face haunting him. He was a blacksmith without a forge, a knight without a lord, a son without a father. He thought he could have been contented in Ste.-Germaine-des-Bois, but the villagers had distrusted Sibylla, which had hurt her more than outright fear would have, and they had moved on.

But in every village and town, she stood out, a peacock among swallows, silk laid down in a drawer full of wool. She had not tried to change, and he had not asked her to—she had left her home, her child's body, her brother's kingdom, her own appearance, behind. But although she had abandoned her rich garments and hammered silver hairsticks and diaphanous veils, she still sat a horse like a queen, and walked like a princess, and spoke like a lady. He could not explain to her why the men shunned her and the women crossed themselves when she passed.

After a time, she came to embrace it, defiantly exaggerating the cadence of her speech and gesturing as though sunlight still glinted off her absent rings. She had been as kind to him as she knew how to be, which was not much, and during her last illness, he cradled her as she coughed blood onto his hands.

Her blood was easy to wash off. He watched the thin red streaks in the water as he rinsed his hands one morning, watched them dissipate, and then turned away.

The Breton country was beautiful in spring; the ocean was dark and cold, but the air carried on it promises of warmth. The hard-packed sand of the shoreline was a delight to ride on, and he found himself making a strange sound one morning as he and the horse galloped northeast. It was laughter, he realized a few moments later, and he threw back his head and let the salt breeze sting his eyes and cheeks.

It was simply so lonely without a woman, but he grew used to it.


End file.
